Twitter 101, Episode 2: Faster than earthquakes

Today, welcome back Mr. Attack Resistance for his second guest blog about Twitter--why Twitter is faster than earthquakes.




Here’s the second installment of my three part series on the
ins and outs of Twitter.
If you missed the first part, you can find it here
or you can read this brief recap:




First there was fire. Then shadow
puppets. Everyone hates shadow puppets now, unless you’re this guy. 45,000 years go
by until it occurs to someone to write down their thoughts. Most probably a
husband trying to document what he actually said. Another 4,000 years brings
printing presses, so we can blame Gutenberg for US Weekly. Then telegraph, then telephone, radio, TV, fax, ARPANET,
Al Gore’s Interwebz, e-mail, Sixdegrees.com, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter.




So let’s talk about why you should use Twitter. The most
prevalent piece of feedback I get about Twitter is from people who claim they
don’t “get it”. One person even said, publicly, “What is the point of Twitter?
Only 140 characters? I don’t get it.” It’s worth noting that this statement is
66 characters long and was made as a Facebook status. The point, of course, is
that most people already get it, they just don’t understand how to function in
a social media realm that isn’t constantly bombarding them with ads or
invitations to milk a pink cow that exists strictly as a series of 1s and 0s.
Let’s strip Facebook down to its core and see what is left after the fluff is
removed:






 Status updates – Small snippets of text used to
start conversations or make declarations. Typically just a couple of sentences.
Photos – People take a picture, then upload it
to Facebook. Little known fact: This was, originally, one of the main reasons
for having a Facebook page.
Links – You read a funny blog
post, and then share it with your friends.
Private Messages – You want to talk to a friend
about something that is potentially inflammatory, but don’t want the drama that
will come from saying it publicly.
 Event Invitations – You’re celebrating the end
of political ads by gathering all your friends together and drinking copious
amounts of gin. One message
allows you to invite everyone and see who’s come.



These real cows want you to Tweet

Ready for a bombshell? Twitter can do all of these things.
Best of all? You’re not going to get buried in invitations to join an electronic
mob or to unlock new jewels in some weird solitaire game, and there will be
far, far fewer instances of that one person you said hello to one time in high
school friending you and subjecting you to all of their personal drama. See,
with Twitter, you’re not subjected to requests to be on someone’s list of
followers like in Facebook. Someone follows you and they see what you tweet. If
you like what they have to say you follow them back. If their BS gets too
annoying you just unfollow them. It doesn’t send them a message or anything,
you just stop seeing what they tweet. The end.







More than that, though, Twitter is much more searchable than
other social media. This is accomplished, in part, by using the vaunted
hashtag. I’ll talk more about hashtags tomorrow,
when we get into the how of Twitter,
but right now you just need to understand that it’s a searchable tag that is
used to group like comments together. The best part, to me, is that when trends
start happening you can see this instantly and globally. 




For instance, during
the rather rare Eastern
quake in 2011 people were reading tweets about the earthquake moving up the
coast before the shaking started. They were mainly “WTF? Was that an
#Earthquake?” tweets, but I can foresee an early warning system that could
automatically alert people in the affected area (outside of the epicenter, of
course). Maybe then Italy could pull their head out of their asses and release
those scientists they jailed for not predicting an earthquake.
Because of this ability, and because I am addicted to my timeline, I typically
know about regional, national, or global events long before typical media
outlets have even begun to think about what to say. 




Here’s a great for instance:
On November 10th, 2012 at around 11PM EST a house exploded in
Indianapolis, killing two, injuring others, and damaging lots of surrounding
property. The first tweet I saw about it was at 11:11 PM EST. In just ~10
minutes after a catastrophic event occurred roughly 100 miles away from me I
heard about it from a friend in the area. They didn’t call, they didn’t text,
they told everyone in their followers list at the same time. Within a few hours
there was a hashtag floating around that allowed for easier tracking. #IndyBoom
started trending and suddenly the nation is in on the whole affair. There was
the inevitable dust up as some people got a little offended about the seeming
crassness of #IndyBoom, but these are people that probably don’t understand
that succinctness is key when communicating in this venue. If you were watching
the evening news in Indianapolis you would not have heard about it. Twitter is
faster than your local news station.




So! Let’s review. Twitter is great because:



Does everything Facebook does. 
No farms, no mobs, no annoying invitations. 
No high school BS drama about friending or unfriending someone. 
Faster than your local news stations. Also, earthquakes. 
Searchable. You can find out what people are saying about your favorite subject at any given time. Anywhere in the world. 
Easier to share other people’s content. 
I’m there.

Tune in tomorrow for a lesson on how to get started with
Twitter and some suggestions on who to follow, who to avoid, and what mistakes
you’re probably going to make when you get started.